 We really do want to rewrite our national stories. We really are at risk of a kind of no-nothing, cancel culture iconoclasm. And so we Conservatives will defend our history and cultural inheritance. To edit it now is as dishonest as a celebrity, trying furtively to change his entry in Wikipedia and it's a betrayal of our children's education. Britain's Conservatives are obsessed with the idea that we should never erase our history. There is a cancer in our education establishment. Attempting to change the history of this country, attempting to airbrush out the people they don't like from the history of this country. The idea that modern day Oxford University is in any way racist or oppressive is nonsense. Why do you stay in this country if you take such offence when you see Nelson's column? If you take such offence when you hear Winston Churchill's name? It feels sort of like with just one Sikh soldier there, you start going, oh did the Sikh soldiers serve with the English, I'm not a historian so I don't know. This whining isn't new but after a statue toppling spree last year, starting with Edward Colston's statue in Bristol, the whinging has reached a fever pitch. This kind of behaviour is a step on the road that leads to mob rules, to tumbles, to the guillotine. This is about our cultural heritage being under threat. These are our Great British Values so we're going to strip away our Great British Values. These people be clear, want to destroy our country. In Britain this has caused outrage on the right. Sure, these were awful people then sinuated that they never actually say that but they were products of a different time. We shouldn't be erasing the past and bringing down statues and forgetting our history. Well that just isn't British. But what if forgetting history was a central part of British identity? What if erasing the historical record wasn't just encouraged but a matter of national policy and the basis of a decades-long clandestine operation to whitewash colonial misdeeds? Well it turns out that it was and its name Operation Legacy. In the aftermath of the Second World War it was quickly apparent that Britain's empire was falling apart. This came as something of a shock. After all, as recently as 1939 it had arguably been the most powerful empire in history, exercising control over a quarter of the world's population. During the country in 1940 Churchill still talked to an empire lasting a thousand years. If the British Empire and its Commonwealth lost for a thousand years men will still say this was their finest hour. And yet by 1947 the previously unthinkable happened as India gained independence. A year later British troops pulled out of Palestine and the manner of both withdrawals created scars which remain with us today, the standoff between India and Pakistan being one and the Israel-Palestine conflict being another. A hallmark of such retreat was the destruction of official records. During the partition of India in 1947 one administrator observed how the press greatly enjoyed themselves with the pool of smoke which hung over Delhi during the mass destruction of documents by the British. And after the withdrawal from Palestine was announced a correspondent in Jerusalem wrote how the burning of files is progressing satisfactorily. The fact such seemingly un-British behaviour was recorded by the press was a cause for embarrassment. So by the early 1950s, as it became obvious that the whole empire would eventually go, these efforts became a coordinated secret programme to eliminate all evidence of British wrongdoing. This was the genesis of Operation Legacy, so called to protect the legacy of Britain after the loss of its empire. It's aim being to maintain the charade that Britain was somehow different and more progressive than other colonial powers. A myth fundamental to our national identity even today. The British put in a system that actually brought about education, that actually brought about partial emancipation of women, that actually brought about democracy. It's time to stop seeing empire as a dirty word. One example of how pervasive that myth is can be found in the Home Office Guide for the UK Citizenship Test. It tells us there was, for the most part, an orderly transition from empire to commonwealth with countries being granted their independence. And such a convenient comforting myth is based precisely on what the right claim they disliked. The Erasure of History. The woke religion. Rewriting history. Judged history in whichever way it chooses to. Changing school curriculums. Wipe out any vestiges that there were bad people. It's the erasing of history. If you start to try and delete individual, little parts of history, you finish up with literally nothing left. How extensive was Operation Legacy and what kind of documents did it destroy? Well, we have something of an answer as a result of an instruction from Ian McLeod and Colonial Secretary in 1961. He wrote that post-independence nations should not be handed material that might embarrass Her Majesty's government, embarrass members of the police, military forces, public servants or others such as police informers, that might betray intelligent sources or be used unethically by ministers in the success of government. Basically, anything viewed as negative was fair game for destruction. This was necessary to eliminate evidence that would undermine the myth that the British establishment was busy constructing. This had explicitly racist, anti-democratic and anti-worker aspects with long-held documents on political parties and trade unions first among those set for destruction. Alongside them were any papers which might be interpreted as showing religious intolerance on the part of Her Majesty's government and all papers which might be interpreted as showing racial discrimination against Africans. We might think the British Empire was less racist and bigoted than others than it somehow prepared the countries it ruled over for democracy. But that's partly because the records demonstrating otherwise were systematically destroyed. Here's another myth. Compared to the US before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Britain likes to think of itself as superior on issues of race. That makes some sense given certain states in the US prohibited the cohabitation and marriage of whites and non-whites until just 60 years ago. And yet between 1902 and 1961, the White Highlands of Kenya were exclusively reserved for white Europeans, hence the name. This was a form of apartheid under the British Empire with white settlers who comprised a tiny part of the population owning most arable land. It was a similar situation in Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, and elsewhere where Britain did pretty much the same thing as the United States. It's just its racist apparatus was primarily overseas and therefore out of sight. The word legacy in Operation Legacy also had a secondary meaning with legacy files be handed over to newly independent countries. But before such handovers took place, those files that weren't destroyed were extensively weeded. In Zambia, colonial officials were issued orders to destroy all papers which are likely to be interpreted either reasonably or by malice as indicating racial prejudice or religious bias on the part of Her Majesty's government. In Kenya, instructions were given which meant only British subjects of European descent could participate in weeding. Ensuring that required an elaborate code. Files marked DG, for instance, were meant to be for the viewing of the deputy governor. In reality, however, DG indicated documents that could only be viewed by British officers of European descent. Documents marked WATCH stamped with a red W were to be removed from the country in question or just destroyed. The steps were taken to ensure that post-colonial governments would never learn such vitally important files existed. With those officials involved, even told to keep their W stamps locked away. So why did this all happen? Well, the answer is quite simple because the British Empire committed innumerable atrocities. In Kenya, for example, the weeding of official documents was particularly necessary after the suppression of the Mao Mao uprising. That struggle, which took place between 1952 and 1960, saw 1.5 million of the Kukuyu people and indigenous people of Kenya put in detention camps with around 150,000 losing their lives during the uprising. During this period, white settlers openly called for the extermination of the Kukuyu while mass torture was used. It should come as no surprise that not on visiting Kenya in 1955, Labour MP Barbara Castle compared the regime's attitude to Nazism. Some documents from the era survived, however, stashed away at the secretive Hans-Loch Park. But these were only revealed in 2011 after a lawsuit brought against the British government by Kenyan torture survivors. Their case was partly based on oral testimony gathered by Harvard academic Caroline Elkins and what emerged from the migrated archives confirmed their accounts of systematic abuse and torture. Yet these files were a mere fragment of what should have been found expecting around 240,000 files Elkins only uncovered several hundred. Yet even this was enough and after multiple defeats in court, the British government finally moved to settle the case. I would say it is not quite enough because of our punishment which we had because for some years which we have been punished, it cannot pay off. It's important to say that such an admission of the truth happened against all of the odds. What other stories like it will never be uncovered. What's more, given the nature of Operation Legacy, the apology from the British government is essentially meaningless. Britain's problem is that it was caught. Similarly in Aden in 1967, there was an orgy of burning when the British departed. As with Kenya, this made sense given the widespread use of torture by the British, something documented by Amnesty International in 1966. A number of people died in captivity, though we don't know how many because the records have mostly been destroyed or remain inaccessible. Meanwhile in Malaysia, while fighting an insurgency after World War II, the British used concentration camps in Agent Orange, inspiring the US to adopt similar tactics against the Vietnamese. Here too, documentary evidence was destroyed and in 1957, one official reported to have five lorry loads of documents were incinerated at a naval base in Singapore. What was so appalling that those documents had to be destroyed and the past erased? After all, as we hear so frequently, doesn't Britain care about the truth? Doesn't it care about history? Operation Legacy continued all the way into the 1970s and remarkably, almost none of the countries involved besides Kenya and Malta appear to have known anything about it. Despite claims to the contrary, Britain is among the most secretive states in the world. MI6, for example, has never made a single page of a single document public since its creation in 1909. Yet alongside that secrecy was industrial-scale destruction of evidence documenting British crimes against humanity. The idea that Britain's empire was more progressive than those of other European powers is a myth. But the fact it's widely believed required erasing history as a matter of state policy, all of which means those who are pulling down statues aren't rewriting history, but starting an overdue conversation about a colonial legacy, which the powerful have done everything to obscure, dismiss, and deny for more than half a century. The people that really care about historical truth well, they're the ones who dumped it in Colston in Bristol's docks. We wanna create more videos like this. What kind of topics would you like to see covered specifically? Put that in the comments below.